Project Team:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS)

LYRASIS

Artefactual, Inc.

2017-2020

OSSArcFlow

Investigating, Synchronizing, and Modeling a Range of Archival Workflows for Born-Digital Content

The Educopia Institute, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS), LYRASIS, and Artefactual, Inc., are investigating, synchronizing, and modeling a range of workflows to increase the capacity of libraries and archives to curate born digital content. These archival workflows will incorporate three leading open source software (OSS) platforms—BitCurator, Archivematica, and ArchivesSpace—and the project will be designed to generate findings that can be generalizable to settings that are using other platforms and applications.

This project will significantly impact curation practices by increasing our understanding of how institutions of different sizes and types may engage in OSS tool integration and workflow development. Our findings will be used to support a broad range of libraries and archives actively collecting and curating digital content. The knowledge gained by working with multiple institutions of different types and sizes will also broaden field-wide understanding of curation approaches and priorities, and how those impact the use of tools and capabilities in Archivematica, ArchivesSpace, and BitCurator. We expect the empirical findings about institutional needs, as well as formal workflow models, to contribute to digital curation research literature.

Project Outputs

1. Digital Dossiers (published January 2018, design updated May 2020)

Ahead of the partner meeting on December 4-5, 2017, project partners created digital dossiers outlining the form, function, and future of digital curation at their home institutions.

2. Born Digital Archiving Workflows (published June 2018)

In the fall of 2017, the project team worked with partners at each institution to mockup a visual representation of their current workflow activities. Representing a “snapshot in time,” these documents show how a diverse group of institutions are using OSS tools in their workflows to curate born-digital content. They also provide an essential starting point for synthesizing and comparing both the gaps and overlaps that currently exist between common OSS tools and environments.